Chapter Three: Shouter Studies
Chapter Three
Subject: Shouter Studies
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 01/09/15 19:38
To: Randall Clay
There are disadvantages to being in the top twenty (he said modestly) of an emerging field of study, as I learned this week back at school. Just when I thought I had a comfortable Senior Slide ahead of me, things got...complicated. Maybe I should start from the beginning. Way back when the Christmas Message first appeared,there was a brief period of time when people thought that translating the thing was going to be easy. That's because a big chunk of the message was in what we call Technical, which is the Shouter's closest equivalent to a written language.
Thing is, Technical is, as a language, extremely incomplete. You can do math and geometry in it, and you can do physics and chemistry too, but go too far beyond that, and you start to run out of vocabulary. You might be able to manage biology, but the Shouters didn't put all that much biology in the message, so that's moot. So we were able to get enough information to be able to build the shouter batteries and nano-twine and the Pi-field generators that stop nuclear explosions and make fusion power practical, but that part was only a tiny, tiny percentage of the Message. They went and uploaded their entire culture into the message, and it's been extremely tough getting any of it out again.
This is because the Shouter language is, to human ears and brains, extremely difficult. How difficult? Well, it wasn't until two years ago that we proved that there's only one language present in the message. (And I mean we literally, here; my name is on the paper in question.) First off, each shouter has two mouths (in addition to the thing that they eat with, which we call the maw to avoid confusion). The top one produces the 'trills', the major information component of their spoken language, but the bottom one is important too. It's main function is producing a beat that their sonar senses use to perceive their environment, but that beat has different modes to it, a combination of 'stances' and 'moods' that go into determining the meaning of what they're saying with the trills. On top of that, Shouters don't have conversations like you and me. They don't ever wait for the other person to finish talking, no, and almost every conversation has at least three speaklers. All talking at the same time. With two voices each. So yes, it's a difficult language.
So dificult, in fact, that it's been impossible for anyone much older than me to make any kind of progress on at all. Theory is that human brains are much better at learning new languages when they're younger, and the last few years have borne that out, as most of the forward motion on translation has been done by people in my age cohort, give or take a couple of years. There's a top tier of about twenty of us in the United States, and two of us-me and Travis Patrick are going to school right here in Moss Landing. Along with, I'd say, another five or so of the next hundred or so. So we've got an excellent 'program', if that's what you want to call it, and Moss Landing High. Which brings us to the problem.
See, over Christmas break someone decided that it was at least a decent bet that the performance here was not just simple luck but rather the hard work of our teacher, Curt Lamont. Could be they're right; he's certainly the best teacher at the place, although that could be subject bias on my part speaking. Anyhow, that someone was the dean of some private school out East, and he basically offered Lamont more money than he could in good conscience refuse to pack up and sign on over there, starting with this semester.
The practical result of this is that the new teacher is, for all intents and purposes, just a chaperone for the class, and, since I'm a senior and Travis isn't, I'm the one who's going to wind up doing the teacher job this year. Principal Thomas gave me the pitch that getting in early teaching experience would give me a leg up against the other Tenure-Track Freshmen at the UW next year, and he may well be right at that, but I'm sure it's going to be a rough couple of months. Let me tell you about my first day.
To start with, I find out about Lamont's desertion, straight from the principal's mouth, at 9 AM. By 9:20 he's talked me into doing the teaching. At 9:40 I check online and it turns out I'm not alone, and about half of the top high schools have had their teachers sniped during the holiday vacation. The ones at private schools usually managed to snag another teacher somewhere down the line, but the other public schools generally went with the same kind of option. And then the class I've got to teach started, 10:00 AM.
I decided to stick to that Lamont had planned on covering for the first week, which I was lucky enough to know in advance, and, after explaining the situation to the class, I spent about fifteen minutes going on about the idea of Ur-texts: works of literature in a language that are quoted and referenced by so many speakers that the turns of phrases they contain become cliches and buried metaphors deep within the language itself. For Greek, for example, Homer's works are an Ur-Text. In modern English, we're talking Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the twenty-five season run of The Simpsons. One of the current projects that the world's xenolinguistics students are working on right now is identifying the Shouter Ur-Texts, which means finding phrases that repeat in multiple works, and then tracing them back to their earliest occurances, and seeing which of the oldest works influenced phrasing the most. We've finally settled on a dozen or so transliterations of the recorded Shouter speech that we think are good enough; that don't lose key information content or code in too much noise, and that's the next step. After that, we'll start trying the translate them, using a combination of the sonar-video context and wild-assed guessing, and refine the guesses based on how much or little sense the more recent Shouter documents start making. But first, the work is on identifying the Ur-texts, which is database busywork enough to keep things fairly calm.
It didn't hurt, I guess, that our chaperone/teacher was Mrs. Lincoln, a librarian who's general pleasant demeanor and, when enraged, vicious temper were both well know. Even if she seemed to be almost taking a nap, her presence kept order. I expected some resistance from Travis, but none came. He's a year younger than me, and frighteningly talented at this. It's a good thing that there aren't Xenolinguistic duels, or else he'd have called me out and I don't know if I'd have come out on top, but luckily, seniority still wins the day. My vauge plan is to turn the rest of the class into the equivalent of graduate research assistants, and split them up with him. Maybe Jack Snowden, too, not sure. And after that, put them to work helping with the translation of whatever Ur-Text I wind up with in the loterry next month.
At least now I have even more of an excuse for letting my other classes slide.
Outside of school, not much is happening down here. Mom is still going out with Pope Paulsen now and again, although I don't think it's gotten particularly serious. I ran into your ex- Sharon earlier in the week. Amazingly, she's still together with Peter Hammond, who's started working at his dad's auto repair shop. Apparently he's taking night classes learning how to service the new Hybrids and Electric cars based on the Shouter battery tech that are supposed to start going down in price any day now, so they'll probably be doing okay.
Your Brother,
Douglas
Subject: Shouter Studies
From: Douglas Clay
Date: 01/09/15 19:38
To: Randall Clay
There are disadvantages to being in the top twenty (he said modestly) of an emerging field of study, as I learned this week back at school. Just when I thought I had a comfortable Senior Slide ahead of me, things got...complicated. Maybe I should start from the beginning. Way back when the Christmas Message first appeared,there was a brief period of time when people thought that translating the thing was going to be easy. That's because a big chunk of the message was in what we call Technical, which is the Shouter's closest equivalent to a written language.
Thing is, Technical is, as a language, extremely incomplete. You can do math and geometry in it, and you can do physics and chemistry too, but go too far beyond that, and you start to run out of vocabulary. You might be able to manage biology, but the Shouters didn't put all that much biology in the message, so that's moot. So we were able to get enough information to be able to build the shouter batteries and nano-twine and the Pi-field generators that stop nuclear explosions and make fusion power practical, but that part was only a tiny, tiny percentage of the Message. They went and uploaded their entire culture into the message, and it's been extremely tough getting any of it out again.
This is because the Shouter language is, to human ears and brains, extremely difficult. How difficult? Well, it wasn't until two years ago that we proved that there's only one language present in the message. (And I mean we literally, here; my name is on the paper in question.) First off, each shouter has two mouths (in addition to the thing that they eat with, which we call the maw to avoid confusion). The top one produces the 'trills', the major information component of their spoken language, but the bottom one is important too. It's main function is producing a beat that their sonar senses use to perceive their environment, but that beat has different modes to it, a combination of 'stances' and 'moods' that go into determining the meaning of what they're saying with the trills. On top of that, Shouters don't have conversations like you and me. They don't ever wait for the other person to finish talking, no, and almost every conversation has at least three speaklers. All talking at the same time. With two voices each. So yes, it's a difficult language.
So dificult, in fact, that it's been impossible for anyone much older than me to make any kind of progress on at all. Theory is that human brains are much better at learning new languages when they're younger, and the last few years have borne that out, as most of the forward motion on translation has been done by people in my age cohort, give or take a couple of years. There's a top tier of about twenty of us in the United States, and two of us-me and Travis Patrick are going to school right here in Moss Landing. Along with, I'd say, another five or so of the next hundred or so. So we've got an excellent 'program', if that's what you want to call it, and Moss Landing High. Which brings us to the problem.
See, over Christmas break someone decided that it was at least a decent bet that the performance here was not just simple luck but rather the hard work of our teacher, Curt Lamont. Could be they're right; he's certainly the best teacher at the place, although that could be subject bias on my part speaking. Anyhow, that someone was the dean of some private school out East, and he basically offered Lamont more money than he could in good conscience refuse to pack up and sign on over there, starting with this semester.
The practical result of this is that the new teacher is, for all intents and purposes, just a chaperone for the class, and, since I'm a senior and Travis isn't, I'm the one who's going to wind up doing the teacher job this year. Principal Thomas gave me the pitch that getting in early teaching experience would give me a leg up against the other Tenure-Track Freshmen at the UW next year, and he may well be right at that, but I'm sure it's going to be a rough couple of months. Let me tell you about my first day.
To start with, I find out about Lamont's desertion, straight from the principal's mouth, at 9 AM. By 9:20 he's talked me into doing the teaching. At 9:40 I check online and it turns out I'm not alone, and about half of the top high schools have had their teachers sniped during the holiday vacation. The ones at private schools usually managed to snag another teacher somewhere down the line, but the other public schools generally went with the same kind of option. And then the class I've got to teach started, 10:00 AM.
I decided to stick to that Lamont had planned on covering for the first week, which I was lucky enough to know in advance, and, after explaining the situation to the class, I spent about fifteen minutes going on about the idea of Ur-texts: works of literature in a language that are quoted and referenced by so many speakers that the turns of phrases they contain become cliches and buried metaphors deep within the language itself. For Greek, for example, Homer's works are an Ur-Text. In modern English, we're talking Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and the twenty-five season run of The Simpsons. One of the current projects that the world's xenolinguistics students are working on right now is identifying the Shouter Ur-Texts, which means finding phrases that repeat in multiple works, and then tracing them back to their earliest occurances, and seeing which of the oldest works influenced phrasing the most. We've finally settled on a dozen or so transliterations of the recorded Shouter speech that we think are good enough; that don't lose key information content or code in too much noise, and that's the next step. After that, we'll start trying the translate them, using a combination of the sonar-video context and wild-assed guessing, and refine the guesses based on how much or little sense the more recent Shouter documents start making. But first, the work is on identifying the Ur-texts, which is database busywork enough to keep things fairly calm.
It didn't hurt, I guess, that our chaperone/teacher was Mrs. Lincoln, a librarian who's general pleasant demeanor and, when enraged, vicious temper were both well know. Even if she seemed to be almost taking a nap, her presence kept order. I expected some resistance from Travis, but none came. He's a year younger than me, and frighteningly talented at this. It's a good thing that there aren't Xenolinguistic duels, or else he'd have called me out and I don't know if I'd have come out on top, but luckily, seniority still wins the day. My vauge plan is to turn the rest of the class into the equivalent of graduate research assistants, and split them up with him. Maybe Jack Snowden, too, not sure. And after that, put them to work helping with the translation of whatever Ur-Text I wind up with in the loterry next month.
At least now I have even more of an excuse for letting my other classes slide.
Outside of school, not much is happening down here. Mom is still going out with Pope Paulsen now and again, although I don't think it's gotten particularly serious. I ran into your ex- Sharon earlier in the week. Amazingly, she's still together with Peter Hammond, who's started working at his dad's auto repair shop. Apparently he's taking night classes learning how to service the new Hybrids and Electric cars based on the Shouter battery tech that are supposed to start going down in price any day now, so they'll probably be doing okay.
Your Brother,
Douglas
posted by Jeff R. at 5:10 PM
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